Of course, they didn't just ignore Sailer's claims. I provided the corrected abortion data to Levitt and Donohue back in 1999, well before they had even published the first version of their abortion and crime research. Unfortunately, they didn't deal with it in their QJE piece. (My work with John Whitley shows how that this has a big impact on their results..) For the entire Wall Street J. letter see here. Note I have corrected an error that was in the op-ed's second paragraph above.

More on possible vote fraud in Milwaukee

From John Fund writing at OpinionJournal.com's Political Diary:

John Kerry won the swing state of Wisconsin by 11,000 votes out of some three million cast last November. Now many are wondering how solid that "win" was. An official inquiry into irregularities surrounding the Wisconsin election has just been finished by U.S. Attorney Steven Biskupic, a Republican appointee, and Milwaukee County District Attorney E. Michael McCann, a Democrat. In Milwaukee County alone, 4,609 more ballots were cast than can be matched with actual voters. In addition, more than 200 felons were allowed to vote illegally, more than 100 people double-voted and 1,300 people voted on Election Day even though their same-day registration cards were missing names, addresses or other key data.

5/09/2005

My research on the Judicial Confirmation Process makes the front page of the Sunday Boston Globe

UPDATE: I am disappointed by the Boston Globe, though it seems as if their errors were a result of a series of unintentional mistakes. I had provided the Globe with numbers for the confirmation rates for both the District and Circuit court, but the newspaper only showed the numbers for the District court and accidentally labeled those as being for all Federal judicial nominees. Given that the confirmation rates move in opposite directions for the two courts and that the Circuit court is the more important, this created a fairly misleading impression. While the mistake made a big difference, I accept their explanation for what happened as an accident.

UPDATE 2: From the Boston Globe (Tuesday, May 17, 2005): "Because of a graphics editor's error, a chart accompanying a May 8 story on federal judicial nominations was incorrectly labeled. The chart showed the average number of days to confirm District Court nominees and the percentage of District Court nominees confirmed by presidential administration. A corrected version of the chart appears today on page A8." They still don't correct the point that they previously labeled District court judges as all judges, but this is a definite improvement and I am glad that they did this.

Original Post: I haven't seen it yet, but apparently the front page of yesterday's Sunday Boston Globe had a chart with my numbers on how the judicial confirmation process has changed over time. The article is here, but it doesn't contain the chart.

The battle over John Bolton

Given the battle over confirming John Bolton to be ambassador to the United Nations, one issue that hasn't been mentioned is the upcoming UN get together on regulating small arms (namely rifles and handguns). Bolton is widely seen as one tough guy and this is one issue that Americans who support people's ability to defend themselves would want someone such as Bolton there fighting this fight. I believe that Bolton's position is sympathetic to people's ability to defend themselves and that he is concerned about the overreaching of UN authority into national affairs.